Telecoms.com

RIM

As the global director for terminals marketing at the Vodafone Group, Peter Becker-Pennrich holds decision making powers over a procurement strategy that deals in serious volumes. Vodafone buys between 60 and 70 million handsets each year, spending $8bn across it’s footprint, including affiliates and partner markets. In this exclusive interview Becker-Pennrich offers frank assessments of the different strategies adopted by the vendor community, their chances for success and the nature of the relationship – ever evolving – between operators, vendors and platform developers.

Research in Motion (RIM) has announced that it will delay the next version of its PlayBook operating system until February next year. The BlackBerry maker said it will not launch the PlayBook OS 2.0 until it is confident it has fully met the expectations of its developers, enterprise customers and end-users.

Research In Motion (RIM) has unveiled its new BlackBerry BBX mobile platform; a hybrid of the BlackBerry platform and the QNX operating system that the firm uses in its tablet offering, the PlayBook. The BBX platform has been designed from the ground up, said RIM, and the BBX operating system will support BlackBerry cloud services and development environments for both HTML5 and native developers.

Embattled Blackberry vendor RIM is confident that it can win back the trust of its customers following last week’s high profile outage. Stephen Bates, RIM’s UK MD told Telecoms.com on Tuesday that the firm will continue to innovate as it looks to make amends for the outage.

UAE mobile operators Etisalat and Du have both announced that they will compensate BlackBerry users for the recent disruption to their services. Both operators have said they will compensate BlackBerry users on both pre-pay and post pay accounts.

RIM Founder and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has apologised to BlackBerry users around the world for the outages that its service has experienced over the week in a YouTube video. The message comes in the fourth day of service disruption, which has affected millions of users around the world.

UAE operator Etisalat has teamed up with MasterCard Worldwide to launch cashless mobile payments programme in the country. The system uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to authorise everyday transactions via a smartphone.

RIM’s BlackBerry service is offline once again, just hours after the service was restored earlier on Tuesday. During the earlier outage, the reasons for which were not explained by BlackBerry, millions of customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were left without access to the internet or its BBM instant messaging tool. According to reports and commentary on Twitter, the same has happened again today.

RIM has announced that its BlackBerry services have been restored. The company had a service blackout yesterday, leaving millions of customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa without access to the internet or its BBM instant messaging.

RIM’s has seen its profits slide to less than half of what it generated in the previous quarter, and to little over 40 per cent of what it made in the same quarter last year. The company’s quarterly earnings for 2Q11 revealed that its net income for the quarter was $329 million. This marks a steep drop from the $695 million it recorded in 1Q11, an even steeper fall from the $797 million made in 2Q10.

Vodacom, the pan-African subsidiary of Vodafone, is reducing connection speeds for some of its BlackBerry users in South Africa “from 3G to 2G levels”. The company said that it studied the usage patterns of its customers to better understand the causes of congestion at peak times and found that more than 95 per cent of BlackBerry data usage was attributable to less than 5 per cent of users.

As device platform providers seek to build out their feature arsenals, Blackberry vendor RIM has come up with an innovative cloud-based music locker. Released on Thursday, BBM Music allows users to build and share music libraries with support from big name labels including Universal Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music and EMI.

Troubled Canadian BlackBerry vendor RIM is betting on the souped up BlackBerry 7 operating system to turn its fortunes around. On Wednesday the company unveiled three new models – updates to its Bold and Torch lines – all running the new flagship OS.

Canadian vendor Research In Motion has announced that it is to lay off 2,000 staff as part of the cost-cutting programme the firm unveiled in June. The Blackberry manufacturer said that the cuts, which will affect more than ten per cent of its workforce, were “a prudent and necessary step for the long-term success of the company.”

The bunfight for Nortel’s patent chest concluded yesterday, with Chief Strategy Officer George Riedel’s announcement that “following a very robust auction”, the winning bid came from a buyer too big for even Google to take on. Following months of speculation and a $900m kick-off bid from Mountain View, the booty has gone to a consortium that reads like a Who’s Who of the tech industry: Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, RIM and Sony. Even with names like that in the mix, the $4.5bn price paid is still pretty eye-watering or, as Nortel’s Riedel preferred to put it, “unprecedented.”

Research in Motion (RIM), already under massive pressure from declining sales and a pending class action suit from disgruntled shareholders, is being sued by audio giant Dolby for alleged patent infringement. The lawsuit, which was filed jointly in both America and Germany yesterday, centres around patents for audio compression technology.

Microsoft has joined HP, Motorola Mobility and Nokia in a growing line of tech companies opposed to Google’s proposed $900m purchase of Nortel’s patent assets. According to Redmond, a 2006 deal means that Microsoft has a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free licence to all of Nortel’s patents” and that this agreement is binding regardless of who buys the intellectual property.

In a clear bid to make up ground lost to Android and iOS devices, embattled Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has announced its acquisition of German social-gaming outfit Scoreloop. With sales of the Blackberry PlayBook reported to be less than stellar, commentators are suggesting that Scoreloop’s in-app billing capabilities played a hand in the deal as RIM looks to play catch-up in an increasingly cut throat apps market.

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